The production of hydrocarbons from underground reservoirs is a highly complex operation, from the initial exploration using seismic data to the decisions on how to perform a hydraulic fracture of the formation surrounding a borehole sometime prior to production. This specification focuses on the latter—decisions regarding fracture of the formation (sometimes referred to singularly as a “completion”, or plural “completions”).
There are host of software tools available to the engineer charged with making decisions regarding completions. However, the software tools are “islands” to themselves, each performing a specific task in the overall series of steps to be performed, but not communicating, or not communicating well, with the software tools used before and/or after in the overall flow of work. For this reason, the task of selecting a completion for a borehole is a very time consuming task for the engineer. In fact, some experts estimate that around 70% of an engineer's time is spent coordinating data flows between software tools (i.e., gathering, formatting, and translating data for use by disparate software tools).
Thus, any advance which shortens the amount of time needed for an engineer to make a selection regarding completion, provides the engineer with non-intuitive information by way linking of separate software tools, or provides the engineer a broader array of completions from which to make a selection, would provide a competitive advantage in the marketplace.